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Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Norvig's latest paper on Lisp
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From: Erik Naggum
Message-ID: <3231037926708825@naggum.net>
Organization: Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway
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Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 06:32:11 GMT
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* lin8080
| When someone comes from java to lisp, he wish to have a java-like lisp.
| This is automatically done by brain, name it habit.
This applies only to some people, apparently a minority of about 30%, who
think they have a natural right or something to behave and think this way
and so are impossible to cause to think differently. You see this in
tourists, too, who come to some other country, and behave just like they
have a right to feel at home, who complain that local facilities are not
as good as those at home, etc. For some reason, Germans are known around
Europe for this particularly annoying tourist behavior, but I find it
kind of sad that you think this is so natural that you should not even
try to limit such clearly stupid tendencies.
| (sorry for my poor english)
It is quite ironic that you write so much German with English words and
English grammer, which is just what people of the habit you think is
unavoidable would naturally do. However, many people actually manage to
learn to speak and write a new language on its own terms, and retain only
minor vestiges of their previous languages. I think this is the natural
behavior, and that getting stuck in whatever you first learned or saw is
the aberration -- and it usually leads to serious problems, too.
In other words, I reject your belief in the automaticity of this habit.
It is a failure to think that causes this, and while one may call it some
kind of default, and that thinking is not automatic, but requires effort
-- claiming that non-thinking is automatic means you do not have the
choice to think, and that is just plain wrong. Believe it, though, and
it becomes true for you. Change that belief. Reverse it: Do not make a
conscious effort to think, _always_ make the effort to think, and then
see that some things do not change, and then you do not need to think
about them.
--
In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none.
In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.
70 percent of American adults do not understand the scientific process.